Friday, September 30, 2005

Remember that game? I was in 10th grade the first time I played it. Although it'd been out for awhile at that point, my parents finally got me that NES that I'd wanted since 6th grade for Christmas when I was in high school. By that time SNES was already out, so "a day late and a dollar short, Mom and Dad!" But it was all I had, and I was thankful, dammit!

Scott and I were extremely bored the other day, so we strolled on down the CD and Game Exchange down the street and for $50 we picked up Shadowgate (for the Gameboy; luckily the GBA is backwards-compatible), Banjo Kazooie, Paper Mario and Jet Force Gemini for the N64 and another copy of Eternal Darkness for the Cube. I've played them all many times over, but seeing as Scott has always primarily been a PC/PS guy, he hadn't ever really dicked around with the cool N64 games that Rare made in their glory days, and had only fiddled with Eternal Darkness once when we rented it before we moved in together. He has clearly been missing out, and thank goodness we can still find all that shit for 5 or 10 bucks each.

Anyway, I forgot how complex Shadowgate was. The puzzles and adventure aspects of the game are still light years beyond what's coming out these days, despite that fact that the "adventure" takes place within a text box that is your DM's wet dream. I don't miss the shiny at all. It's just so much fun to fuck around with something so delightfully old school and not be able to use my years of adventure/puzzle gaming experience to fly through it. It's nice to revisit something and still get the same enjoyment out of it as I did when I was a kid, and it's even nicer to know that I haven't become jaded by the ocular masturbation that is modern gaming.

Now if I can just figure out what the fuck I'm s'post to do in that room after the gargoyles...

3 comments:

Keep a save near the end, when you get there. This sounds silly, but for some reason the music during the end scene really got to me back in the day. It will randomly pop into my mind from time to time.